White Paper on Data Mashups

September 28, 2010

We continue to work on projects that shift the emphasis from basic search to more sophisticated types of information retrieval. The companies in this market sector range from giants like SPSS (now part of IBM) and SAS to smaller firms that owe their origins to investments from the US government; for example, Recorded Future and Purple Yogi (now Stratify).

We noted the article titled “InetSoft Publishes Business Intelligence White Paper on Data Mashups”. The document of interest is a white paper authored by InetSoft, one of the companies pushing forward with data mashup technology. The paper asserts:

Data mashup is a data transformation and integration technique that puts control into the hands of the business user. Data mashup melds the flexibility of a spreadsheet with enterprise-level security, performance, repeatability, and collaboration.  Data mashup can function in a complimentary relationship with warehousing, and can serve as a cost-effective substitute for traditional ETL [extract, transform, and load].

Spotting, digging out, and analyzing business data from disparate sources is expensive and time consuming. Further, this data must then be used for business intelligence (BI) decision-making and analysis. BI aims to support better decision-making by transforming raw data into meaningful and useful information used to enable effective and strategic decision-making. The main point is that business intelligence can save licensees of mashup systems time and eliminate reporting costs. Like other next generation companies, the implication is that InetSoft offers a flexible framework.

Our view is that the “mashup” or data fusion sector is now the next big thing in search and content processing. We are uncertain about the time and expense of marketing these next generation systems, however. In our view, as traditional search vendors face commoditization for low value, low complexity solutions, the hunt for new revenue will create significant opportunities for confusing potential customers.

Search is not really simple, but it is now tired. The next generation content processing systems have vigor, but will the excesses of enthusiasm create the same type of market perplexity that befuddles some procurement teams? What will the azurini do? How will the marketers at the rising number of “data fusion” firms position their products?

Excitement ahead.

Stephen E Arnold, September 28, 2010

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